Varied Types eBook

It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers;
if so, the matter could be more appropriately described
by saying that modern readers are neglected by Providence.
The ground of this neglect, in so far as it exists,
must be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment
that, like the beard of Polonius, he is too long.
Yet it is surely a peculiar thing that in literature
alone a house should be despised because it is too
large, or a host impugned because he is too generous.
If romance be really a pleasure, it is difficult to
understand the modern reader’s consuming desire
to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure, it is
difficult to understand his desire to have it at all.
Mere size, it seems to me, cannot be a fault.
The fault must lie in some disproportion. If
some of Scott’s stories are dull and dilatory,
it is not because they are giants, but because they
are hunchbacks or cripples. Scott was very far
indeed from being a perfect writer, but I do not think
that it can be shown that the large and elaborate plan
on which his stories are built was by any means an
imperfection. He arranged his endless prefaces
and his colossal introductions just as an architect
plans great gates and long approaches to a really large
house. He did not share the latter-day desire
to get quickly through a story. He enjoyed narrative
as a sensation; he did not wish to swallow a story
like a pill, that it should do him good afterwards.
He desired to taste it like a glass of port, that
it might do him good at the time. The reader
sits late at his banquets. His characters have
that air of immortality which belongs to those of
Dumas and Dickens. We should not be surprised
to meet them in any number of sequels. Scott,
in his heart of hearts, probably would have liked
to write an endless story without either beginning
or close.

Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore, mysterious
man. He will never be understood until Romance
is understood, and that will be only when Time, Man,
and Eternity are understood. To say that Scott
had more than any other man that ever lived a sense
of the romantic seems, in these days, a slight and
superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises
from one fundamental mistake—­the idea that
romance is in some way a plaything with life, a figment,
a conventionality, a thing upon the outside.
No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until
we have grasped the fact that romance lies not upon
the outside of life, but absolutely in the centre
of it. The centre of every man’s existence
is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely
material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle.
That these brutal forces always besiege and often
capture the citadel does not prove that they are the
citadel. The boast of the realist (applying what
the reviewers call his scalpel) is that he cuts into
the heart of life; but he makes a very shallow incision,
if he only reaches as deep as habits and calamities
and sins. Deeper than all these lies a man’s